Legal Blog

This morning the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two criminal-procedure cases. The first is Ayestas v. Davis, which involves the standards for funding an investigation establishing an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim in a capital case. Steve Vladeck previewed the case for this blog. Another preview...

Congress should create a national criminal justice commission, both to suggest improvements in the justice system and to highlight successful programs that can be replicated around the U.S., says U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD).
President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Photo by Opus Penguin via Flickr
Raskin spoke on...

Tamron Cox-Little didn’t plan her first pregnancy, but it turned into a bigger blessing than anyone could have imagined.
It probably saved her life.
Cox-Little is a 10-year, peritoneal mesothelioma survivor whose ultrasound late in that pregnancy first alerted doctors to a small and unusual growth inside...

The FBI’s 2016 Crime in the United States report, the first annual compilation released in the Trump administration, contains about 70 percent fewer data tables than the 2015 version did, a removal that could affect analysts’ understanding of crime trends, reports FiveThirtyEight.com. The change comes...

White nationalists were greatly outnumbered by counterprotesters Saturday during a “White Lives Matter” rally in Shelbyville and decided to cancel a second rally in Murfreesboro, the USA Today Network Tennessee reports. Law enforcement in both cities made painstaking efforts to keep the groups separate. Officials...

We expect orders from the October 27 conference on Monday at 9:30 a.m. The court will hear oral argument on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, beginning at 10 a.m. each day. The calendar for the November sitting is available on the court’s website. On Friday the...

An average of nearly 500 calls a day rang into Cincinnati’s Center for Addiction Treatment (CAT) in September. The website caught 1,100 visits a day. The problem is that immediate treatment is hard to get, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports. “We are not close to treatment-on-demand...

States including Colorado, Texas and California have begun to reduce use of solitary confinement, also called “segregation.” In 2015, Pennsylvania Corrections Secretary John Wetzel called it “unprecedented … that you have the corrections field … look at segregation and say, ‘Look, we need to do...

The FBI counterterrorism division’s identification of a new movement it calls “black identity extremists” is the latest addition to the broadening list of protesters and dissidents the agency puts in the “domestic terrorism” umbrella, McClatchy Newspapers reports. National security experts say the designation doesn’t describe...

A federal grand jury has approved the first charges in the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller, CNN reports. Anyone charged may be taken into custody as soon as Monday, sources said. Mueller was appointed in May to lead the investigation into Russian meddling...